Peer-reviewed publications

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) special report on global warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius (°C) makes clear that most scenarios (90%) that hold warming to 1.5°C by 2100 include an overshoot, or a period in which the temperature increase exceeds 1.5°C before declining to the end-of-century 1.5°C goal (IPCC 2018). An overshoot is also possible for 2°C scenarios, given the lack of ambition in existing mitigation commitments. Current conservation policy and planning does not adequately account for the high likelihood of a temperature overshoot in a 1.5°C scenario, but the impacts of an overshoot on conservation may be large. Efforts to avoid an overshoot must be increased through more ambitious mitigation commitments and a greater focus on peak warming rather than end-of-century outcomes. Simultaneously, conservation planning should account for such impacts by anticipating more dynamic systems that carry greater uncertainties and potentially irreversible changes that may persist even as temperatures peak and decline.

The HydroATLAS database provides a standardized compendium of descriptive hydro-environmental information for all watersheds and rivers of the world at high spatial resolution. Version 1.0 of HydroATLAS offers data for 56 variables, partitioned into 281 individual attributes and organized in six categories: hydrology; physiography; climate; land cover & use; soils & geology; and anthropogenic influences. HydroATLAS derives the hydro-environmental characteristics by aggregating and reformatting original data from well-established global digital maps, and by accumulating them along the drainage network from headwaters to ocean outlets. The attributes are linked to hierarchically nested sub-basins at multiple scales, as well as to individual river reaches, both extracted from the global HydroSHEDS database at 15 arc-second (˜500 m) resolution. The sub-basin and river reach information is offered in two companion datasets: BasinATLAS and RiverATLAS. The standardized format of HydroATLAS ensures easy applicability while the inherent topological information supports basic network functionality such as identifying up- and downstream connections. HydroATLAS is fully compatible with other products of the overarching HydroSHEDS project enabling versatile hydro-ecological assessments for a broad user community.

Forests provide vital ecosystem services crucial to human well-being and sustainable development, and have an important role to play in achieving the seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations 2030 Agenda. Little attention, however, has yet focused on how efforts to achieve the SDGs will impact forests and forest-related livelihoods, and how these impacts may, in turn, enhance or undermine the contributions of forests to climate and development. This book discusses the conditions that influence how SDGs are implemented and prioritised, and provides a systematic, multidisciplinary global assessment of interlinkages among the SDGs and their targets, increasing understanding of potential synergies and unavoidable trade-offs between goals. Ideal for academic researchers, students and decision-makers interested in sustainable development in the context of forests, this book will provide invaluable knowledge for efforts undertaken to reach the SDGs. This title is available as Open Access via Cambridge Core.

Boreal forests are globally extensive and store large amounts of carbon, but recent climate change has led to drier conditions and increasing fire activity. The objective of this study is to quantify trends in fire size and frequency using data spanning multiple scales in space and time. We use multi-temporal Landsat image compositing on Google Earth Engine and validate results with reference fire maps from the Canadian Park Service. We also interpret general fire trends through the concept of Self-Organized Criticality (SOC). Our study site is Wood Buffalo National Park, which is a fire hot spot in Canada due to frequent lightning ignitions. The relativize differenced normalized burn ratio (RdNBR) was the most accurate Landsat-based burn severity metric we evaluated (52.2% producer's accuracy, 87.6% user's accuracy). The Landsat-based burn severity maps provided a better fit for a linear relationship on the log-log scale of fire size and frequency than a manually drawn fire map. Landsat-based fire trends since 1990 conformed to a power-law distribution with a slope of 1.9, which is related to fractal dimensions of the satellite-based fire perimeter shapes. The unburned and low-severity patches within the burn severity mosaic influenced the power-law slope and associated fractal dimensionality. This study demonstrates a multi-scale and multi-dataset technique to quantify general fire trends and changing fire cycles in remote locations and establishes a baseline database for assessing future fire activity. Testing criticality by power laws helps to quantify emergent trends of contemporary fire regimes, which could inform the strategic application of prescribed fire and other management activities. Natural resource managers can utilize information from this study to understand local ecosystem adaptability to large fire events and ecosystem stability in the context of recent increasing fire activity.

As the 2020 deadline for meeting the Aichi Biodiversity Targets approaches, countries have focused on achieving the goal of protecting 17% of their terrestrial lands (Visconti et al., 2019). A less-appreciated aspect of Aichi Target 11 is for protected areas (PAs) to be "well-connected". Evaluating the degree to which a system of PAs is connected is therefore of major policy importance. In two recent papers in Biological Conservation, Saura et al. (2018, 2019) develop metrics to assess the connectivity of PA systems. These metrics have the potential to inform global policy around PAs, and we commend the authors for pursuing this research.

Our intent with this response is to illustrate that while Saura et al. provide a starting point for assessing the connectivity of nations' PA systems, their method has significant omissions that render its application to policy unclear. We show, using empirical examples from the world's largest transfrontier conservation landscape (Fig. 1A), that the Saura et al. method may misinform the assessment of PA connectivity, relative to a more realistic approach that considers the hospitability of the underlying landscape for animal movement.

1. The functional trait diversity of species assemblages can predict the provision of ecosystem services such as pollination and carbon sequestration, but it is unclear whether the same trait-based framework can be applied to identify the factors that underpin cultural ecosystem services and disservices. 2. To explore the relationship between traits and the contribution of species to cultural ecosystem services and disservices, we conducted 404 questionnaire surveys with birdwatchers and local residents in Guanacaste, Costa Rica. 3. We used an information–theoretic approach to identify which of 20 functional traits for 199 Costa Rican bird species best predicted their cultural ecosystem service scores related to birdwatching, acoustic aesthetics, education and local identity, as well as disservices (e.g. harm to crops). 4. We found that diet was the most important variable explaining perceptions of cultural ecosystem service and disservice providers. Aesthetic traits such as plumage colour and pattern were important in explaining birdwatching scores. We also found people have a high affinity for forest-affiliated birds. 5. The insight that functional traits can explain variation among cultural perspectives on values derived from birds offers a first step towards a trait-based system for understanding the species attributes that underpin cultural ecosystem services and disservices.

Ship strikes are one of the main human-induced threats to whale survival. A variety of measures have been used or proposed to reduce collisions and subsequent mortality of whales. These include operational measures, such as mandatory speed reduction, or technical ones, such as detection tools. There is, however, a lack of a systematic approach to assessing the various measures that can mitigate the risk of ship collisions with whales. In this paper, a holistic approach is proposed to evaluate mitigation measures based on a risk assessment framework that has been adopted by the International Maritime Organization (IMO), namely the Formal Safety Assessment (FSA). Formal Safety Assessment (FSA) is "a rational and systematic process for assessing the risk related to maritime safety and the protection of the marine environment and for evaluating the costs and benefits of IMO's options for reducing these risks". The paper conceptualizes the use of a systematic risk assessment methodology, namely the FSA, to assess measures to reduce the risk of collisions between ships and whales.

The transboundary Mekong Basin has been dubbed the "Battery of Southeast Asia" for its large hydropower potential. Development of hydropower dams in the six riparian countries proceeds without strategic analyses of dam impacts, e.g., reduced sediment delivery to the lower Mekong. This will impact some of the world's largest freshwater fisheries and endangers the resilience of the delta, which supports 17 million livelihoods, against rising sea levels. To highlight alternatives, we contribute an optimization-based framework for strategic sequencing of dam development. We quantify lost opportunities from past development and identify remaining opportunities for better tradeoffs between sediment and hydropower. We find that limited opportunities remain for less impactful hydropower in the lower basin, where most development is currently planned, while better trade-offs could be reached with dams in the upper Mekong in China. Our results offer a strategic vision for hydropower in the Mekong, introduce a globally applicable framework to optimize dam sequences in space and time, and highlight the importance of strategic planning on multiple scales to minimize hydropower impacts on rivers.

The magnitude and pace of global change demand rapid assessment of nature and its contributions to people. We present a fine-scale global modeling of current status and future scenarios for several contributions: water quality regulation, coastal risk reduction, and crop pollination. We find that where people’s needs for nature are now greatest, nature’s ability to meet those needs is declining. Up to 5 billion people face higher water pollution and insufficient pollination for nutrition under future scenarios of land use and climate change, particularly in Africa and South Asia. Hundreds of millions of people face heightened coastal risk across Africa, Eurasia, and the Americas. Continued loss of nature poses severe threats, yet these can be reduced 3- to 10-fold under a sustainable development scenario.

Land-use changes and the expansion of protected areas (PAs) have amplified the interaction between protected and unprotected areas worldwide. In this context, 'interface processes' (human–nature and cross-boundary interactions inside and around PAs) have become central to issues around the conservation of biodiversity and ecosystem services. This scientific literature review aimed to explore current knowledge and research gaps on interface processes regarding terrestrial PAs. At first, 3,515 references related to the topic were extracted through a standardized search on the Web of Science and analyzed with scientometric techniques. Next, a full-text analysis was conducted on a sample of 240 research papers. A keyword analysis revealed a wide diversity of research topics, from 'pure' ecology to sociopolitical research. We found a bias in the geographical distribution of research, with half the papers focusing on eight countries. Additionally, we found that the spatial extent of cross-boundary interactions was rarely assessed, preventing any clear delimitation of PA interactive zones. In the 240 research papers we scanned, we identified 403 processes that were studied. The ecological effects of PAs were well documented and appeared to be positive overall. In contrast, the effects of PAs on local communities were understudied and, according to the literature focusing on these, were very variable according to local contexts. Our findings highlight key research advances on interface processes, especially regarding the ecological outcomes of PAs, the influence of human activities on biodiversity, and PA governance issues. In contrast, main knowledge gaps concern the spatial extent of interactive zones, as well as the interactions between local people and conservation actions and how to promote synergies between them. While the review was limited to terrestrial PAs, its findings allow us to propose research priorities for tackling environmental and socioeconomic challenges in the face of a rapidly changing world.